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It's definitely still rough, but having just handed off a laptop to a client whose Windows HD died and I replaced it with Ubuntu 11.04 until he could dig up his install discs, Ubuntu still has it. The client after using the machine for 3 days decided it was exactly what he needed and intended not to factory restore the new HD.

It's very clean and fast on the right hardware. Shuttleworth, I think, bit off a bit more than he could chew with the aggresive roadmap for releasing Unity.

The user experience is a clear shift from the Gnome/KDE paradigm, which will annoy people who are used to doing things a certain way, and that way hasn't been properly addressed in Unity, but with OSX Lion now hitting the market with touch capabilities built in... If by 12.04 Ubuntu starts showing up on tablets / becomes easier to install on tablets, people will be singing a different tune. I want very much to give 11.10 a go on an HP TouchSmart desktop (or better yet, on my ASUS Transformer's microSD).

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Um I call Bullshit on your calling bullcrap, OS X is THE worst when it comes to real usability.

Let's just make a list of 10 things:

1. Global menu:
Global menus have always been an absolutely terrible design, it sacrifices usability for a few vertical pixels. Simple Usability test, have two windows open side by side, or otherwise such that both windows are fully visible. Now from having the focus on one window quickly open up a menu from the other window.

On a mac: give focus to the other window and then move the mouse to the top panel
On something reasonable: move mouse over to other window and click on menu.

2. Scrollbars:
OS X Lion has made scrollbars not only difficult to see but nigh impossible to actually use. Though one may argue that one should just use scrolling gestures but that brings us to...

3. Scroll Gestures:
in Lion instead of staying with the standards that everybody already knows they've reversed them in order to unify the gesture with their Ipad.. but problem the interface concept between a touch screen and a touchpad are completely different, particularly when a standard has already been established and accepted.

4. Window buttons are on the wrong side unless you happen to be one of those left handed people:
OS X is known for having their window buttons on the left side and on top of that instead of being icons they're colors, but that'll be point #5. There is a reason that those buttons are normally on the right, it is because most people are right handed and so it is both easier reach and more natural for people who are right handed. Now one might then point out: Why is the start button then normally on the left side then? It is simply because we are a culture that reads L-to-R, and thus naturally menus will cascade out to the right because of that, I imagine that R-to-L cultures have it on the other side, and you often see screenshots from asia with the menu bar on the right side of the screen.

5. Window button colors are a non-obvious explanation of use to the average person
While it's not hard to intuit the meaning or understand it after playing around with it, without a pictogram for explanation particularly in conjunction with #4 I can't just set the average user about using it and expect them to know what each one does.

6. The dock bar
Some people like dock bars and others of us detest them, from the usability failure that is making the icons accordion, to the fact that if any large amount of software is pinned to the dock which is effectively a start menu replacement, then the icons become small enough as to be unusable.

7. Applications do not close when you have closed all windows
To my knowledge under every other system when you tell a program to close from the window buttons it closes, on a mac it stays open until you use the global menu or the shortcut sequence to close it.

8. Nonstandard shortcuts
Although each of the three main systems have their own sets of shortcuts, there have come to be standards that are expected, such as the Ctrl-{c,v,x,a} set, Standard controls are of course a usability concern and Apple has decided to continue going against those standards by continuing to only have their old Apple shortcuts based off their apple key.

9. Can't reposition things in the manner that you want, It's Apple's way or it's... Apple's way. You have no choice in this regard, and thus people cannot change the environment to suit their needs best. Instead you have to conform to the software rather than the software conforming to you.

10. The filesystem tree is kludgy and fails to conform to the *nix standards we all know and love, while this specifically may not effect most users this is huge to me personally, and having things not where I expect them to be breaks usability for me. I mean why the hell are they not using /home for instance?

You make some interesting points. The newest version of osx I used was 10.4 so I'm not in a position to judge fairly but I always found burning cd's very counter intuitive.

TBH I don't think usability of either gnome 2 or kde 4 are currently really an issue for linux. Linux noobs are more likely to face problems with hardware drivers, finding suitable linux software and other issues involving the relative obscurity and multi distro and geeky nature of linux.

Gnome 3 and unity are not here to address some non existent problem with desktop usability. They seem to be about creating a gui that works seamlessly on both desktop and tablet. They both need work but I quite like gnome 3. Although that's the kind of 'like' where I would never use it myself in its current form.

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The user experience is a clear shift from the Gnome/KDE paradigm, which will annoy people who are used to doing things a certain way, and that way hasn't been properly addressed in Unity, but with OSX Lion now hitting the market with touch capabilities built in... If by 12.04 Ubuntu starts showing up on tablets / becomes easier to install on tablets, people will be singing a different tune. I want very much to give 11.10 a go on an HP TouchSmart desktop (or better yet, on my ASUS Transformer's microSD).

I wouldn't hold my breath for Ubuntu on the tablet, Plasma Active's Contour is where the show is really at. Unlike Ubuntu they can and have mobilized their development team to produce not only an advanced tablet interface, but more critically they've mobilized them to create touch friendly UXes for the myriad of programs inside the Software Collection. You don't have at least a base set of touch friendly programs and you've just killed your entire project right there, don't believe me? Play with one of the various Windows 7 based tablets out there and you'll see what I mean.

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It's definitely still rough, but having just handed off a laptop to a client whose Windows HD died and I replaced it with Ubuntu 11.04 until he could dig up his install discs, Ubuntu still has it. The client after using the machine for 3 days decided it was exactly what he needed and intended not to factory restore the new HD.

It's very clean and fast on the right hardware. Shuttleworth, I think, bit off a bit more than he could chew with the aggresive roadmap for releasing Unity.

I wouldnt say that.
It is rather the perfect time to introduce Unity, 3 versions before the LTS. It may be sort of buggy right now, but it will ripen until 11.10 and hopefully be perfect in 12.04, the next LTS.
And even more hopefully, more OEM Vendors will sell their Laptops, etc with Ubuntu 12.04.

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You make some interesting points. The newest version of osx I used was 10.4 so I'm not in a position to judge fairly but I always found burning cd's very counter intuitive.

TBH I don't think usability of either gnome 2 or kde 4 are currently really an issue for linux. Linux noobs are more likely to face problems with hardware drivers, finding suitable linux software and other issues involving the relative obscurity and multi distro and geeky nature of linux.

Gnome 3 and unity are not here to address some non existent problem with desktop usability. They seem to be about creating a gui that works seamlessly on both desktop and tablet. They both need work but I quite like gnome 3. Although that's the kind of 'like' where I would never use it myself in its current form.

Well I figure that If I'm going to be advocating against people using it, that I should at least drop into a retailer with macs every once in a while to stay updated on what the latest travesties are, as whenever I toy with them I'm always left with a feeling of disgust at what they've done. Particularly as for some reason they get lauded for having the best usability, which is really just a lie that the cult of mac keeps repeating enough times for people to believe it, not really the truth as I stated in what you quoted.

I would certainly agree that there are no major usability problems with Gnome 2 or KDE4, minor issues here and there sure, but nothing like the nonsense that is global menus.

The Shell is designed in order to minimise distraction and interuption and to enable users to focus on the task at hand. A persistent window list or dock would interfere with this goal, serving as a constant temptation to switch focus. The separation of window switching functionality into the overview means that an effective solution to switching is provided when it is desired by the user, but that it is hidden from view when it is not necessary.

And okay there's two paths to seamlessness: the Gnome/Unity approach which is to say a jack of all trades and a master of none type approach which ends you up with a kludge not really good for much of anything, or the KDE approach where you have multiple dedicated environments that you shift between based upon whether you've got it just as the tablet or you've docked it, etc..This way you can be a master of all, which is of course a much better approach. Or to put this another way, Gnome/Unity are going for the Monolithic Approach, whereas KDE as per typical is going for the UNIX approach.

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True but it's also the responsibility of commercial distributors (and Canonical is one) to make sure everything works well together. Ubuntu is very bleeding edge.
Often the last bugfix release of the previous major version of some software works better than the latest dot-0 major release.

Ubuntu is no community project. Even if one submits patches to Canonical, it's on Canonical?s ? and only Canonical?s ? discretion if those patches get accepted. That Canonical requires contributors to sign a CLA that allows Canonical to sue its contributors makes matters only worse.

Oh wait, all of this distributions use or will use GNOME3. Even Debian switches to GNOME3 in 2013. The only distribution which will support GNOME2 until 2015 (and even longer) is RHEL or one of its clones (CentOS, SL, etc.).

GNOME 3 contains a GTK3 port of the classic GNOME 2.x GUI. So even GNOME 2.x fans have no reason to bitch against GNOME 3.

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GNOME 3 contains a GTK3 port of the classic GNOME 2.x GUI. So even GNOME 2.x fans have no reason to bitch against GNOME 3.

I'm a KDE fan having started using it at 4.3, after gnome drove me away because of their cutting down on my configurability options (having been introduced to linux through Ubuntu I was driven to retheme the entire DE to get away from the Fugliness and not being able to fix the GDM broke the deal for me.. I mean seriously what's with Ubuntu and the Ugly theming?), however having played with gnome3 fallback in a VM I must say that it's much more constrained in what you can do with it than last I saw gnome, and thus they have plenty to complain about, plus if the fallback is set up how I think it is, you can't layer Compiz or Kwin on top of it to greatly improve your multitasking capability.

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GNOME 3 contains a GTK3 port of the classic GNOME 2.x GUI. So even GNOME 2.x fans have no reason to bitch against GNOME 3.

Not entirely true. Fallback mode *is* based on a port of the Gnome 2 components, but it's changed to somewhat resemble the Gnome 3 appearance. It's not all that close a resemblance, but nor is it identical to it's predecessor.

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As a Ubuntu 10.10 user, I did try Unity which comes as an optional package. It's not for me, same as the Windows 7 UI, but I can't understand how Canonical thinks it is good for the average user - unlike what happens for, say, XP.

It's not intuitive, and it's cumbersome to locate programs other than the few listed on the deck. You just REQUIRE to activate the good old menu to do navigate around - and the search box is still far from KDE's one.

I'll stick to 10.10/Gnome 2 for both my laptop and HTPCs and Debian 6.0/KDE 4 (migrated from Kubuntu 10.10) on my main PC, thank you.